Climate Change and Sustainability

"Today's oil and gas are at record prices, and yet global energy demand is increasing because of population and economic development pressures. Climate change, resulting in large part from the burning of fossil fuels, is exacerbating the impact of the accelerated exploitation of our natural resources. Therefore, anxieties over energy, water, and climate security are at an all-time high. Global action is needed now to address this set of urgent challenges and to avoid putting the future of our civilization at risk. This book examines the powerful interconnections that link energy, water, climate, and population, exploring viable options in addressing these issues collectively. Difficult political decisions and major reforms in resource governance, policies, market forces, and use are needed, and this book provides excellent introductory material to enable readers to begin to understand and address these problems."

As American leadership over climate change declines, China has begun to identify itself as a great power by formulating ambitious climate policies.Based on the premise that great powers have unique responsibilities, this book explores how China’s rise to great power status transforms notions of great power responsibility in general and international climate politics in particular. The author looks empirically at the Chinese party-state’s conceptions of state responsibility, discusses the influence of those notions on China’s role in international climate politics, and considers both how China will act out its climate responsibility in the future and the broader implications of these actions. Alongside the argument that the international norm of climate responsibility is an emerging attribute of great power responsibility, Kopra develops a normative framework of great power responsibility to shed new light on the transformations China’s rise will yield and the kind of great power China will prove to be.The book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, China studies, foreign policy studies, international organizations, international ethics and environmental politics.

Most, if not all of the global biogeochemical cycles on the earth have been broken or are at dangerous tipping points. These broken cycles have expressed themselves in various forms as soil degradation and depletion, ocean acidification, global warming and climate change. The best proposal for an organic solution to fixing the myriad broken cycles is a deliberate investment in solutions that first acknowledge the historic roles played by both the subjugated peoples, and the economic beneficiaries of the environmental exploitations of the past. Ever since Europeans made contact with the West, a series of global circumstances including the genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas, the enslavement and global subjugation of Africans, and the emergence of Western concepts of trade dominance and capitalism, have led to deleterious impacts on the global biogeochemical cycles. Addressing the broken biogeochemical cycles should be done with a clear understanding that it was not only human subjects which were subjugated, but also land, water, and air. These three global stores must be replenished from the ideological position that poverty is not simply the absence of money, but is also the lack of access to non-polluting energy sources, to clean air devoid of runaway greenhouse gasses, and to local conditions devoid of climate change instabilities. With this in mind, the global powerbrokers can enter into a new deal with developing nations, shifting the paradigm toward a new ecological approach that rewards good behavior and sets new standards of worldwide relations based on ecologic inclusivity rather than the exclusive economic arrangements currently in order. Harnessing a forward thinking approach to analyzing the current global environmental crisis, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable development, political ecology, sustainable agriculture, climate change and environmental justice.

In this book, Sander Van der Leeuw examines how the modern world has been caught in a socio-economic dynamic that has generated the conundrum of sustainability. Combining the methods of social science and complex systems science, he explores how western, developed nations have globalized their world view and how that view has led to the sustainability challenges we are now facing. Its central theme is the co-evolution of cognition, demography, social organization, technology and environmental impact. Beginning with the earliest human societies, Van der Leeuw links the distant past with the present in order to demonstrate how the information and communications technology revolution is undermining many of the institutional pillars on which contemporary societies have been constructed. An original view of social evolution as the history of human information-processing, his book shows how the past offers insight into the present, and can help us deal with the future. This title is also available as Open Access.

Sustainable investors want to be confident that a company's Environmental (net zero emissions target), Social (response to the COVID-19 pandemic), and Governance (no repeats of Enron and WorldCom) policies and actions are positively impacting the global outlook--and to identify ways that their dollar can incentivize business leaders to do even better. The worldwide rise of an Environmental, Socially Responsible, and Governance (ESG) approach to investing shows you're not alone, and the $30+ trillion--and-- growing committed in this way says it's already become a transformative global movement. ESG provides a framework for evaluating companies that, unlike unrelated investment strategies, informs and guides sustainable investment.